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The Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS.edu) is the largest public policy Ph.D. program in the nation and the only program based at an independent public policy research organization—the RAND Corporation.

Central characteristics of high-performing research units are the high quality of the people and the culture and values displayed within the department, which is often a result of leadership. It is also interesting to explore their differences, such as what makes a unit particularly good at having impact versus producing high-quality publications.

With many different higher education institutions in the UK covering a diverse range of disciplines, and delivering research in a variety of ways, it can be difficult to determine the qualities and characteristics of high-performing higher education institutions.

There is no tradeoff between recognizing the serious methodological problems in the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard, improving the Scorecard, and encouraging providers to release their own data. All three can and should be done simultaneously.

As the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing report suggests, local governments should evaluate police on more than crime statistics, and police departments and officers should be held publicly accountable for meeting the community's expectations. Adding new dimensions of performance metrics would help.

In a tight fiscal climate the UK government has been an innovator in ways to fund and deliver effective public services. New funding arrangements present opportunities for developing the evidence base for policy and practice, since they are associated with different types of service providers.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will significantly increase coverage for the publicly funded treatment of substance use disorders. But in order to maximize the benefit to patients, families, and society, it's critical to invest in the development, validation, and use of performance measures.

the October 2013 edition of Leadership Excellence magazine and on The RAND Blog

Who is best prepared for responding to surprise: a Navy SEAL, an NFL coach, or a Fortune 500 CEO? The answer is that all three professions have something to teach us: The NFL coach is an expert in pre-planning; the SEAL is great under pressure; and a good CEO has become an expert in responding to strategic threats.

Bibliometricians, who have so far paid little attention to how their creations behave when released into the wild, should be monitoring how metrics are being applied and devising guidelines for best practice, writes Gemma Derrick.

Quoted

Those at the bottom of the agricultural supply chain are vulnerable to horrible abuse—slavery, at the extreme. But the same was true in the tomato fields of Florida in the United States until not too many years ago—and the solution developed there may offer a roadmap for doing right by those who put food on the market shelves.

Dean, Pardee RAND Graduate School

It can sometimes seem like there's not much that people on the ground can do... But then you see a community like Sunset Park, working so hard to change its environmental exposure and risk... The question isn't whether they're having an impact; it's what we can do to support them.

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